Sometimes conversations in our office can get bizarre. Take the subject at hand, a hot-rod minivan. Maybe it was a slow news day, but the topic came up because the Mazda 5 is an appealing small van—a minivan in the purest sense—and more fun to drive than pretty much anything else with sliding side doors.

However, driving excitement is hard to appreciate when it’s tempered by an anemic power-to-weight ratio. Even though the Mazda 5 weighs 3358 pounds—that’s pretty mini as far as vans go—its 153-hp, 2.3-liter four doesn’t produce acceleration blisters when asked to propel that much mass.

With that thought in mind, the conversation started getting surreal. And before you could say, “You guys are smoking banana peels,” we were thinking of ways to add some real hustle to the little Mazda’s repertoire. Imagine, we mused, the astonished faces when such an innocent-looking mommymobile lights up its front tires and disappears in a cloud of smoke!

Even more appealing, the solution seemed simple. Since the 5 shares its underpinnings with the 3, we could just acquire a turbocharged Mazdaspeed 3 powertrain and swap it for the stock unit, which would instantly add 110 horsepower. Nothing to it. Guys swap out engines at racetracks in a matter of a couple hours. The result, a one-of-a-kind “Mazdaspeed 5,” would be perhaps the coolest project car yet in our Boss Wagon series [see Boss Wagon History]. And we figured we could do it ourselves.

Uh-huh, that’s what we figured.__________________________________________________________________________________

The Washtenaw Community College Vehicle Performance class poses with the Boss Wagon. Instructor Glenn Franco is second from the left.__________________________________________________________________________________

In the past, our Boss Wagons were built by professionals in very large garages under the supervision of real adults. Thanks to a recent relocation, our new Ann Arbor offices include a garage—but not real adult supervision.

At the 2008 Detroit auto show, we approached Jeremy Barnes, Mazda’s director of product and corporate communications, with the idea of this powertrain swap. He was enthusiastic. This would be the same Jeremy Barnes—a club racer and thoroughgoing enthusiast—who supported our Nelson Ledges 24-hour effort with an MX-5 Miata [“Racing 101: The Crash Course,” March 2009]. It’s probably a good thing we pitched the minivan project before the ill-fated race took place.

Barnes told us it would be a pretty easy swap and that the Mazdaspeed 3 engine would be a simple bolt-in. Shouldn’t be a problem, he reasoned. Shouldn’t. Right.

So what had started as harmless lunch conversation turned into reality quicker than the Detroit Three could sell their private jets. Mazda found us a 5 Touring in Crystal White Pearl Mica paint and delivered it to Ann Arbor on April 8, 2008. A mere eight days later, the 5 was at the local Mazda dealer with a crippled engine.

The culprit was a bad variable-valve-timing solenoid that crinkled a pair of valves in the No. 3 cylinder. We refrained from making a warranty claim because we were about to yank the engine anyway, and besides, Mazda sent us the car and we didn’t get a bill with it.